Hikashop Multi Language and canonical URL

Hi,

HikaShop does not support saving automatically the canonical URL of other languages in Falang. That's something that needs to be done manually in the backend.
However, once you do that, it will use the canonical URL of the current language.
If not, then either Falang's plugin is not activated, or the translation is not activated in Falang or you have some caching on your pages and you didn't clear it before testing the change.

Hi,

If you don't have Falang on your website, then you should not have the translation interface with the flags.
And even if you do, the information you enter there won't be taken into account as that requires the Falang driver system plugin.

So if you want a multilingual website with canonical URLs, it's possible, but you need to turn off the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting. Only the canonical URL will be indexed by search engines, so you still won't have "duplicate content" issues, but the customers will be able to access the product details page from different URLs, which isn't a problem per se (it's only a problem if you configured your shop to display different modules, etc based on the URL's menu item as you'll see the product details page differently based on the URL used).

Hi,

1. The "force canonical URLs on listings" setting is to use the canonical URLs on products listings instead of the dynamically generated URLs. This is something else than the "canonical" meta tag added to the product page when you have the "canonical URL" field filled in on your product. And that's this meta tag that search engines use to reference your pages, so as long as the canonical URL setting of your products is filled with a valid URL you want to reference for your products, turning on or off the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting doesn't change anything for search engines.
That setting is only there so that your users can see the same URL search engines will see.

2. That's correct. You need a canonical URL filled in to avoid that.

3. That's correct, you need the canonical URL fileed, but you don't need the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting to be activated.

4. If you have the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting activated, that's indeed the problem you'll have if you don't enter a canonical URL for each language. That's why I recommended to turn off that setting. That way, HikaShop will generate the URL in the correct language on the listings, while search engines will see only the canonical URL you entered in the product. And it will all work out.

5. That would be better. That way, it can work even with the "force canonical URLs on listings" setting activated. And with that setting turned off, search engines would be able to index one URL per language per product instead of one URL per product. But it can still work without.

Hi,

That's correct, if you want one URL referenced per product per language, you need a canonical URL filled in for each language for each product.

I would rather recommend you either turn off that setting or set it to use the canonical URL if present.
That's because if you set it to "force and generate if missing", it will indeed generate the canonical URL for the product but :
- it might not be for the main language. It depends which language will be used first to display a listing of products with that product on the frontend first.
- once the system fills in the canonical URL of the main product, you can't easily get the canonical URL of the other languages to fill in the "canonical URL" field of each translation popup of the product. You'll basically need to write the URL manually. With the setting turned off, you can first access the product in each language on the frontend, copy / paste the URL of the product for each language in a texte file on your localhost, and then go in your HikaShop backend, edit the product and enter the URL for each "canonical URL" field.